I do not have a Rode Directional VideoMic or anything similar myself. But expect to buy one in a couple months. Worse case scenario I would buy the Panasonic hot shoe mic. Which is not very good according to a couple reviews. So I will be keen to hear your feedback on that if you manage to find an adapter.

I know this will be a fun camera. I just hope it makes the grade for my specific needs so I do not have to return it.

Hi everyone, I just got hold of the v1.0 firmware, so hope to share some samples and comparisons with you in the next couple of days...

PS - thanks for the coffee bugbait, much appreciated! I'm looking forward to hear what you think of the intervalometer. I'll also see if I can find a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adaper to try my rode mics with the FZ150.

I don't know how I haven't found your site before this year but I'm very glad I have. Your reviews are very informative, well thought out and honest. Very useful indeed. Kudos to you, sir!

I've been shopping for a superzoom and actually bought 3 (and returned 2) before settling on the FZ150 this past Sunday.

I'm very happy with how it handles and the image quality (relatively speaking that is... my other camera is a 7D) but I do have a question.

One of the other cameras I recently handled was the Canon SX40 HS and its focus review when "chimping" is exactly as I expected it to be from my 7D experience: the more you magnify the better for checking acuracy.

But on the FZ150, I'm finding that the maximum review magnification, 16X, is nearly useless for this purpose. The detail gets progressively better until 8X and then takes a huge turn for the worse at 16X. I'm assuming this is related to the quality of the jpeg that the camera uses internally for review purposes... or am I missing something obvious in the settings that would make 16X useful for focus review?

This is just my opinion and I'm sure when Gordon reviews the SX40 you'll have way more info to go on but here's what I think.

Both cameras are excellent but they are, of course, slightly different. The SX40's extra reach at the telephoto end is seductive if you like to shoot sports, birds, etc., and the Canon IS is very, very good. Add to that an excellent approach to high ISO processing of jpegs by Canon, who seem to have the knack for reducing enough noise and preserving enough detail without at the same time creating artifacts or blotches. The third camera I tried, by the way, was the Sony HX100V and I found their noise reduction, even toned down to the lowest setting, overly-aggressive and prone to producing artifacts even at low ISO settings where you normally wouldn't expect that.

The Panasonic's jpegs are very close in quality to the Canon ones but I think I'd give a slight nod to the Canon. However, I've been shooting and processing RAW for many years so I know that I can repurpose the FZ150 RAW to suit my preferences. It's likely that the Canon's raw files will be accessible eventually through a popular Canon firmware hacking utility (CHDK) but it will be a slow cludge at best. The Panasonic however has been optimized with the native RAW in mind and will happily do it at 5.5 fps while autofocusing . The Canon's maximum fps with autofocus is at best 1 frame per second. A very large difference for anyone who thinks they might want to shoot sports or even just kids at play with their superzoom.

Those were the 2 biggies that Canon was missing. The things that I'm missing by choosing the Panasonic is the extra reach and the ability to use my Canon flash units in ETTL mode with the Panasonic (I think my 550 EX will still work in manual mode but I haven't tried it yet.)

But even the flash thing is more theoretical than real since the reason anyone with a DSLR already would think of buying one of these is for the convenience of not having to pack a bunch of extras to take along. I doubt that there will be many times when I would use a flash other than the pop-up.

Additionally, the Panasonic just "feels" like a better thought out tool with nice extras like a button dedicated to shooting speed only (bursts with or without AF), a dedicated focus mode (normal, macro, manual) button, the ability to limit the auto ISO maximum, the ability to limit the longest allowable shutter speed, the ability to set the noise reduction intensity for jpegs. All of the above and many more features are missing from the Canon.

In my opinion Panasonic has kept up better than Canon with the R&D on what are useful features in a superzoom. The SX40 despite the obvious IQ increase over their previous model, feels dated by comparison.

I'd love to have the longer reach, Canon's better IS and the more useful focus review at maximum magnification of the Canon in the Panasonic but in the end, I can live without what the Canon offers and the Panasonic doesn't more easily than the reverse.

Hi everyone, as promised I've retested the FZ150 with firmware v1.0, and took the chance to do so in-the-field, allowing me to take a sequence of ISO samples with v0.2, followed by v1.0 from exactly the same position a few minutes later.

After seeing some previous comparisons online, I was expecting a bigger difference, but for my particular composition there was essentially nothing to comment on other than a fractionally longer exposure for the v1.0 samples. See for yourself at:

As I said on that page, I realise this will be a controversial statement, but I'm simply reporting what I captured on the day and have provided each of the original images for download via flickr for you to see for yourself. Maybe the scene in question doesn't have enough really fine detail to really tell them apart.

I'd be very interested to hear what you think.

I also reshot a series of samples for my sample images gallery, so you now have a page with v1.0 samples and the older one with v0.2 samples for comparison.

In other news I tried the FZ150 with a 2.5-3.5mm adapter and successfully recorded audio with a Rode SVM and VMP. I've made a short video comparing them with the built-in mics which I'll publish in the next 24 hours.

BTW, I noticed someone talking about it on the DPR forum and said I'd used two different sample4s.

This is not the case. The camera was the same model. I updated the firmware myself in the church where I made my comparisons. Could you let them know for me please!

One possible explanation is my v0.2 firmware originally tested could have been a little further developed then theirs - hence Panasonic's happiness for me to evaluate it as final, whereas describing theirs as pre-production.

Or it could simply be the type of detail we're comparing. Either way it's an interesting result, but the bottom line is my opinion remains: the FZ150 is a great camera and the image quality is a big step up from the FZ100.

Hmm, I just looked at those 0.2 vs 1.0 firmware shots. I agree they seem to be virtually the same. Personally I don't see this as a problem with the FZ150, because the former pictures were already quite good for a bridge camera. About the best I've seen.

So what's going on? We can only speculate. It could be DPReview or Gordon made a mistake, but I doubt it. What could be going on is some sort of mislabeling of firmware. In other words, DPR's firmware was a different 0.2 than Gordon's. Maybe they used 0.2.001 and Gordon got 0.2.999 and the camera only reports the frontmost digits? Personaly I think its something benign like that.

We shouldn't let that spoil the experience. In the end it seems like the FZ150 is a great camera, lets enjoy it!